December 31, 2008

Chicago's architectural worsts of 2008: Kissing off a 'cathedral of the Cold War' at Naval Station Great Lakes

Ending this week's look at Chicago's architectural worsts of 2008, we revisit the saga of a mid-century modernist gem, the Gunner's Mate School at Naval Station Great Lakes. This gem won't last long. After a debate that stretched over months, the Navy in September announced an exercise in token preservation; part of a single wall of the building will be saved. Here's the original story arguing for full-fledged preservation, originally published Feb. 3.

It is a cathedral of the Cold War, a stark but handsome steel-and-glass box co-designed by Bruce Graham, the architect of Chicago's Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. Within its aircraft hangerlike spaces, Navy gunners-in-training learned to maneuver full-scale guided missile launchers and guns like those on cruisers and destroyers. The curtainlike walls of blue-green glass let in a softly diffused natural light, but they were opaque, concealing from would-be spies what was happening inside.

Here, hidden behind the imposing gates of the Naval Station Great Lakes training center in North Chicago, sits a priceless piece of military and architectural history. And what might be happening to it? The U.S. Navy, under pressure from the Department of Defense to get rid of outmoded buildings, is tiptoeing down a path that would destroy it. The tawdry little McDonald's next door, with the fake mansard roof, would remain, of course.

After preservationists spent millions at a 2003 auction to prevent Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House near Plano from being snapped up by a buyer who reportedly wanted to cart it away, some observers optimistically predicted that we were on the verge of a new age of preserving midcentury modern landmarks. The saga of the now-empty Gunner's Mate School (Building 521, in Navy-speak) reveals a far-more-discomforting reality: The battle to save these vulnerable buildings has just begun.

That much became clear at the base Tuesday at a public hearing to discuss the future of the Gunner's Mate School, which has been vacant for three years. Computers made its training equipment obsolete. Historic preservationists floated idea after idea for re-using the building. A health club? A bookstore? A mess hall? Officials from the Navy's facilities division shot them all down as impractical. Still, the Navy stopped short of signing the building's death warrant. It asked the public to present alternatives, such as leasing the building to a private company, by Feb. 13.

What is at risk is a precious, heretofore little-known, chapter in the story of the Second Chicago School of Architecture, that flowering of power modernism that produced such much-admired landmarks as the Inland Steel Building and the Hancock Center. The German-born Mies was its leader, advocating a cool, rational architecture of steel and glass, and among his most intelligent followers was the Chicago-based architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Designed by Graham and Mies' friend William Priestly, the 1954 Gunner's Mate School was straight out of the master's Bauhaus book -- square in plan, with a handsomely proportioned exterior that enclosed the kind of sprawling, column-free interiors that would later appear in convention centers. "Universal space," Mies called such interiors because they were meant to adapt to different functions over time. Into the building's spaces, roughly 55 feet tall, the Navy plugged towering ship mock-ups, painted battleship gray, and outfitted them with stairways, decks, gunnery and overhead cranes to shift the weaponry around. At the core was a concrete-walled structure that housed classrooms for the sailors, essentially a building within a building.

It was an innovative solution, its sleek, skin-and-bones exterior offering a revolutionary departure from the ruddy, Beaux-Arts buildings that Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt had designed for Great Lakes some 50 years before. When you look at it today -- even with some of the blue-glass windows missing and the interior bereft of sailors, its remaining guns and missile launchers sitting in haunting isolation -- you can see the DNA of the Second Chicago School. According to Skidmore associate director Jason Stanley, Building 521 was Graham's first Skidmore building and the first glass curtain wall designed by the firm's Chicago office. The Inland Steel Building would not be finished for four more years, in 1958.

Yet when news first surfaced that Building 521 might be on the Navy's hit list, Chicago-based preservation advocates at Landmarks Illinois weren't even sure that it was a Skidmore design. The architects not only confirmed its identity, they also produced an intelligent pro bono study for the building's reuse, which proposes that the Gunner's Mate School can be turned into a big mess hall or galley for between $35 million and $40 million. A new inner wall of glass would improve energy efficiency. But after entertaining the idea, the Navy rejected it. At Tuesday's hearing, Navy officials said it would be too hard to feed thousands of sailors at a single facility and that decentralized galleys are a better idea. And they had previously said it would be less expensive to demolish the building and replace it with a new one.

Historic buildings

In light of such flip-flopping, it would be easy to paint the Navy people as bring-out-the-bulldozers Philistines, but the reality is more complex. As I learned during a tour of Great Lakes on Wednesday, they are spending roughly $70 million restoring historic buildings at Great Lakes -- the tower of Hunt's magnificent administration building, for example, is sheathed in scaffolding -- and they are backing a plan to restore another modernist landmark that sits just outside the base's main gate.

That building is the 1942 Hostess House, a once-airy pavilion with projecting, laminated wood beams where sailors and their families could relax. Now all but unrecognizable -- its exterior walls sheathed in wood siding instead of glass, its once-open interior chopped up into small offices with dropped ceilings -- that building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, who would go on to lead Skidmore's New York City office and become the co-winner of the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize. It is now slated to become a museum of Navy history, provided a non-profit group can raise about $12 million.

The unspoken point of my tour around Great Lakes seemed designed to buffer the Navy from criticism that it is insensitive to saving the past. But the tour also revealed something that Navy officials probably hadn't intended: Building 521 is part of a long chain of distinguished architecture at the base, and that chain will be cut irrevocably if it is demolished. Its soaring interior spaces are the midcentury counterpart to Hunt's grand rotunda in the administration building. The remaining missile launchers and guns in Building 521 tell the story of the Navy during the Cold War with every bit as much power as a mural in another Hunt building that depicts a tall-ship naval battle during the War of 1812.

If the Navy really is serious about saving this irreplaceable part of our history, then it should think outside the box about saving this glass box. Maybe it could become a social center -- a kind of "town square under glass" that would provide an indoor counterpart to the formal, mall-like parade ground at Great Lakes' historic core. You'd have eateries, game rooms and coffee shops on one side, a museum-quality display of the old gunnery on the other. You could hang airplanes from the cranes. The point is: The building wouldn't just serve a function. It would inspire, lodge itself in the memory and push the sailors to greater heights.

Creative thinking

Some other options: A fabulously wealthy preservationist could sponsor an invited competition that would get teams of developers and architects to dream up new ideas for the building. Or, as a last resort, the building could be moved to a fledgling architecture school hungry to have a modern landmark on its campus -- or to a military museum.

The American military reportedly has more than half a million buildings in its inventory. The need to save taxpayer dollars is real. But the military's mission should be to defend the American way of life, not to inflict damage on the nation's cultural treasures.

IN THE WEB EDITION: View a gallery of photos from Naval Station Great Lakes training center at chicagotribune.com/greatlakes.

Comments

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I thank the Tribune for continuing to publish articles and opinions of the architecture of Chicago. We've a legacy which few cities in the world can match. It's good to know the Tribune keeps us aware.

I applaud the Tribune on these efforts – this is a great innovative building for its time, and as universal space its adaptive use potential should be high. SOM has done a great job in suggesting some green alternative uses, there is a win-win solution here. This building should not be thrown away - Keep pushing on this topic. Thanks Blair.

Built in 1954? It looked brand new when I went to Radarman "A" school in 1967. I have no memory of the Radar school where I spent hundreds of hours, but I do remember this building, just one of many mysteries on the truly remarkable training center.